Lydia Davis, _Can't and Won't_

DAVIS IS BEST knownfor her none-more-short short stories, some just a sentence or two long, little needle-bullets of fiction that you barely feel as they go in but somehow leave a crater you notice only minutes later.

There are plenty of those here, a lot of them based on passages from Flaubert's letters or Davis's own dreams, but the most memorable stories here (to my mind) are the handful of longer ones, all slow-cookers, near-plotless gradual accumulations of detail that by the end overwhelm you.      

"Local Obits": probably just what the title implies, sentences pulled from obituaries in the local newspaper, some as banal as possible ("Albert was an animal lover"), some of haunting particularity ("She will also be remembered for her extensive collection of elephant figurines"), but over ten pages somehow teetering perfectly between the idea that each of us is unique and the idea that really we are all the same,

"The Seals": memories of the life and death of an older sister, seemingly in no particular order, without much overt emotion, but by the end, I was shaken.

"The Letter to the Foundation": a foundation that has awarded the narrator some whopping big grant would like to know how it has changed her life. The narrator explains, very diplomatically, and with due gratitude to their generosity, exactly why it is her life has not changed so very much. Samuel Johnson, who also noticed that much-anticipated outcomes often wind up making less difference than we expected them to, would have loved this story.

And my very favorite, "The Cows." Working at a house in the country, the narrator can see from her windows a neighbor's cows. The story is nothing but a series of observations about the cows, e.g., "They are nearly the same size, and yet one is the largest, one the middle-sized, and one the smallest," but as one observation succeeds another, the cows progress from being a distraction from work to being a welcome distraction, even a relief, and then an object of interest in their own right, and eventually a mute testimony to some wide truth:

They are still out there, grazing, at dusk. But as the dusk turns to dark, while the sky above the woods is still a purplish blue, it is harder and harder to see their black bodies against the darkening field. Then they can't be seen at all, but they are still out there, grazing in the dark.